Role of teaching hospitals in a developing country.

What role do we envisage for teaching hospitals in this age of tremendous socioeconomic transition that most developing nations are witnessing? Practically all developing countries are hopelessly underdoctored, and the problem of maldistribution of the relatively few doctors there are is a real one. Capitals often have more doctors than the rest of the country put together , and teaching hospitals contain a substantial percentage of this metropolitan complement. But lest we make the fatal mistake of equating the health needs of a nation with the number of practising physicians, we must emphasize the concept here of health teams as the most crucial units of medical manpower. Traditionally teaching hospitals see their main function as undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, research, and specialist care of the sick and injured. In the setting of a developing country one must give due prominence to public health, the central pivot around which most health planning in these localities should rotate. Town and Gown This brings me to the question of relevance, and perhaps of all the messages I need to convey tctight none is more urgent and compelling than that of relevance. To examine the provision of medical care only within the context-of one's own immediate environment instead of within the context of the total provision of care is to fail to see the wood for the trees. In teaching, in research, and in-servce, teaching hospitals must relate their functions to the needs of the society they serve. Town must meet gown, and the success of these training institutions is a measure of the identity of their objectives with overall national health priorities. Medical teaching has a global and catholic connotation. The clientele has widened considerably to include several categories of the health team. The traditional peripatetic concept of ornate buildings and didactic inston must give way to seminars, tutorials, and audiovisual and other practical ways of imparting knowledge. And if the training is not Guest lecture (here abbreviated) delivered on the occasion of the 10th Anniversary of the Lagos University Teaching Hospital on 25 Octo-ber 1972 to be isolated and irrelevant the catchment area must include not only hospital-based staff but field workers and others in peripheral units, for they eventually bear the brunt of the service load. There are of course wide differences in the degree of development of medical education in many of the emergent nations. For instance, medical schools attached …